Browse All Artificial Intelligence Content (1126)

GitHub shows how to use voice prompting in the GitHub Copilot app to quickly turn a spoken “brain dump” into a usable text prompt, helping you get started faster when you’re not sure how to phrase what you want.

Visual Studio Code shares a quick update that OpenAI reduced pricing for GPT-5.6 Luna and GPT-5.6 Terra, and points developers to try both models directly in VS Code.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence details CaptiveCrunch, a Storm-2945 (Midnight Blizzard) campaign abusing captive portals to manipulate traffic, deliver malware, and steal credentials and tokens. The post breaks down the CornFlake and ChocoShell toolchain, device code phishing against Microsoft Entra ID, and provides Defender/Sentinel hunting queries plus practical mitigations for travelers and enterprises.

Allison announces the deprecation of the Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash models across GitHub Copilot experiences, and explains what Copilot Enterprise admins may need to change in model policies so users can select supported alternatives in VS Code and on github.com.

Allison announces a public preview for GitHub Enterprise that lets Copilot admins target AI model policies to enterprise teams, so different groups can be granted additional models beyond an enterprise-wide baseline.

nelsontam introduces Microsoft’s MARS (Map Autoregressive) model on Microsoft Foundry and explains how it converts satellite imagery into GIS-ready vector map data. The post outlines an end-to-end workflow with Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro, including STAC/COG ingestion requirements and practical deployment settings for running geospatial feature extraction at scale.

Samantha Kubota introduces Echoverse, a set of high-fidelity synthetic “worlds” for training computer-use agents, and explains why depth (stateful workflows and database-grounded grading) matters more than sheer environment count. The post shares results from supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, plus links to released code and datasets.

John Savill rounds up a week of Azure platform updates, spanning AKS, networking, API Management, monitoring, data services, and regional expansion, plus a few notable AI model availability items and security-related changes like Azure Enclave and Key Vault symmetric keys.

Amaury Levé introduces an open-source polyglot unit-test generation agent that learns a repo’s conventions, writes tests, and validates they build and run in the project’s normal test workflow. The post explains the agent’s research/plan/execute/check loop, shows benchmark results versus stock Copilot, and includes setup commands for Copilot CLI and VS Code.

junjieli summarizes the July 2026 releases (1.6.3–1.6.6) of the Foundry Toolkit for VS Code, focusing on a flatter, tabbed workspace, inline tool wiring, deeper agent debugging via event-level inspection, and a new Agent Optimization preview that supports measured compare-and-deploy tuning for hosted agents.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how a .NET MCP server can expose a skill as a resource, and how an AI agent client can use that skill to answer a question, using a locally running LLM via Ollama.

KishoreKumarPattabiraman explains how to choose between building an interactive “skill” and an autonomous “sub-agent” when designing reusable AI capabilities, using practical checks around iteration style, voice fidelity, review gates, risk blast radius, and frequency of reuse.

Kristen Womack’s July 2026 roundup for Azure Developer CLI (azd) summarizes releases 1.27.0 through 1.29.0, including new extension install options, a full tool uninstall workflow, Azure AI Foundry resource modeling in azure.yaml, container deployments to Azure App Service, and CI-friendly non-interactive behavior plus a breaking flag rename.

diptiborkar summarizes why Microsoft Fabric and OneLake were recognized as a Leader in Forrester’s 2026 Data Lakehouses report, focusing on a unified lakehouse foundation for analytics and AI, open table formats, cross-cloud interoperability, and built-in governance and security across engines like Spark, SQL, KQL, and Power BI.

Allison announces the retirement of GitHub Models as of July 30, 2026, including the shutdown of the playground, model catalog, inference API, and BYOK support. The post also points teams to Microsoft Foundry for model access and GitHub Copilot for building AI-powered workflows on GitHub.

Samantha Kubota explains how Microsoft is pushing better AI performance per token and per dollar by co-optimizing models with evaluation harnesses and RL environments, sharing recent “Flash” model releases and benchmark results that reduce GPU costs while maintaining quality across products.

Cassidy Williams shows how she used the GitHub Copilot app to modernize an old React codebase by splitting work into stacked sessions and stacked pull requests, keeping changes reviewable while iterating on plans, branching strategy, and dependency upgrades.

Shawn Henry and Tamir Dresher show how to run a multi-agent “Squad” team on top of the GitHub Copilot CLI/SDK and expose it as a first-class Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) AIAgent in a .NET app, including DI wiring, session configuration, and OpenTelemetry-based observability.

Visual Studio Code shares a quick tip for reducing token usage and improving GitHub Copilot results by running a grammar check on your prompt before submitting it in VS Code.

Alym Rayani rounds up July 2026 updates across Microsoft Security, focusing on securing AI and agent environments. The post highlights Project Perception’s agentic SecOps approach, new Microsoft Defender protections (including prompt-injection defenses and cloud agent runtime coverage), Entra identity updates like passkeys-by-default, and Purview controls for data protection and investigations.

Allison summarizes the July 2026 updates for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, including a new preview agent built on the Copilot SDK, built-in .NET and Azure skills, selected-code review actions, and organization-wide custom instructions for consistent Copilot behavior across teams.

Allison announces a new GitHub Copilot enterprise managed setting that lets organizations restrict which managed devices can host remotely controlled Copilot sessions, including options to require SSO, disable remote control, or allow it without restrictions.

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza demonstrates how to debug a real Python API in VS Code, covering breakpoints, stepping, variable inspection, watch expressions, and the call stack, plus how GitHub Copilot can help you understand failures and fix bugs faster.

Fokko at Work demos selected new features in Visual Studio Code 1.131 that relate to GitHub Copilot, including subagents session information in the Agents window and dictation mode, with notes on how enterprise policies and pricing plans can affect feature availability.

Allison summarizes the July 2026 GitHub Copilot updates in Visual Studio Code (v1.127–v1.131), focusing on the Agents window workflow, multi-chat sessions, model and chat controls (including Copilot Vision and BYOK), plus editor, terminal, browser, and accessibility improvements.

Chris Noring shows how to build an AI shopping assistant that remembers customer preferences across sessions by plugging a SQL Server-backed history provider into Microsoft Agent Framework, then explains how the same setup can move from local Docker to Azure SQL Database (including Hyperscale) with only a connection-string change.

demiajayi introduces new Cost Management and Pricing toolsets for the Azure Resource Manager MCP server, enabling AI agents (including GitHub Copilot clients) to query costs, forecast spend, manage budgets and alerts, retrieve pricing, and analyze AKS costs directly through Azure’s control plane.

Allison announces general availability for Copilot code review support for agent skills and MCP server connections, enabling teams to bring internal standards and external context into reviews. The update includes attribution on generated comments and outlines where to configure MCP servers and store tokens in repository settings.

GitHub walks through what an agent Skill is and how to build one in GitHub Copilot, then covers what’s new in the MCP release that shipped this week.

gauravbhardwaj explains how GitHub Copilot’s pooled included credits and metered overages work, and how to use user-level budgets and enterprise budgets to cap spend without unexpectedly blocking developers.

Aurnov Chattopadhyay recaps the June 2026 Azure Arc Server Forum, including updates on the Arc Server AI Agent, Azure Arc Multicloud Connector previews (GCP connector and EKS cluster enablement), and ESU guidance for Windows Server 2016/2012 and SQL Server 2016 end-of-support timelines.

Davide Mauri breaks down where AI genuinely helps in a real-world developer-focused app, using an example that improves how developers find relevant resources faster while keeping the application’s core purpose unchanged.

murray-kp rounds up the July 2026 Microsoft Fabric updates across CI/CD and Git integration, OneLake governance, Spark runtime and diagnostics, lakehouse and warehouse features, and Real-Time Intelligence improvements including Eventstream security and new connectors.

Rachel Kang introduces a new “thinking effort” control in Visual Studio 18.9 Insiders 2 that lets developers tune how much reasoning supported AI models use per request. The post explains the available levels, where to configure them in the model management UI, and how higher reasoning settings affect usage credits and response depth.

GitHub shows how to customize the GitHub Copilot app, including themes and sounds, voice dictation and transcription model settings, and connecting custom MCP servers or local AI models using bring-your-own-key providers.

Allison announces a new GitHub Copilot policy that automatically enables newly generally available models by default for Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise, with a single opt-out control for organizations that need stricter governance.

Lee Stott walks through an end-to-end, production-minded approach for taking a multi-agent system from local development into Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, then distributing it to users in Microsoft Teams. The guide focuses on identity, governance, observability, and repeatable deployment using the FibreOps reference implementation.

Faith Xu shares early production results for MAI-Code-1-Flash in GitHub Copilot Chat in VS Code, focusing on the trade-off between coding quality and token efficiency. The post explains the metrics used (acceptance, code/commit survival, tokens per turn, turns per commit) and what the team learned from aggregate usage data and A/B “Auto” flights.

Allison announces expanded GitHub Copilot app reporting in the Copilot usage metrics API, adding user attribution and rollups across features, models, and languages, plus token and code activity breakdowns to help enterprises compare Copilot surfaces consistently.

Jeff Handley announces MCP C# SDK v2.0, which implements the 2026-07-28 MCP specification revision. The post explains the new stateless-first HTTP transport, standardized routing headers, and Multi Round-Trip Requests (MRTR) for interactive tools, plus what stays backward compatible and what changes for Tasks and other extensions.